> As one of the few who have actually used it, can you give us your perspective on the highlights and limitations of the packaged apps API?
Considering we're a game there is actually very few things that we need to consider from the APIs. We have our own UI and the integration with the OS is quite limited.
The reason we were interested in the Chrome version is that we're essentially a play by mail game in multiplayer so the push notifications are crucial. Unfortunately the way the push works on Chrome is a bit iffy, way less polished than it works on Android and iOS but it's not too bad.
Since we're free to play there are some optional in app microtransactions to monetize the game. These all use the new Google wallet API for packaged apps and they work reasonably well. Since we allow cross play between iOS and Chrome we need to be careful with how we set the prizes and making prize matching between iOS and Chrome is hard due to differences in how tax is handled.
There is on way to query the final prize for an in-app purchase through the API which makes things like "-50%" badges hard to implement. The way the game gets around it is by guessing what the final prize will be. I wish there was a nicer way but I can see why it's done that way.
Prices have been annoying, yes. We ended up geoip-ing to guess the applicable tax and pray that Wallet made the same guess.
There are also some (temporary) limitations with the NaCl runtime (no, it's not PNaCl, at least not yet).
For example, fullscreen on OS X is quite broken. Keys that shouldn't get captured, in particular the one to cancel fullscreen. That (and other small issues) is likely why packaged apps with NaCl aren't yet officially supported there.
Considering we're a game there is actually very few things that we need to consider from the APIs. We have our own UI and the integration with the OS is quite limited.
The reason we were interested in the Chrome version is that we're essentially a play by mail game in multiplayer so the push notifications are crucial. Unfortunately the way the push works on Chrome is a bit iffy, way less polished than it works on Android and iOS but it's not too bad.
Since we're free to play there are some optional in app microtransactions to monetize the game. These all use the new Google wallet API for packaged apps and they work reasonably well. Since we allow cross play between iOS and Chrome we need to be careful with how we set the prizes and making prize matching between iOS and Chrome is hard due to differences in how tax is handled.
There is on way to query the final prize for an in-app purchase through the API which makes things like "-50%" badges hard to implement. The way the game gets around it is by guessing what the final prize will be. I wish there was a nicer way but I can see why it's done that way.